In his speech Saturday, Bannon basked in that victory and warned McConnell that his position was more precarious than ever.
“Up on Capitol Hill, because I’ve been getting calls, it’s like before the Ides of March. They’re just finding out who’s going to be Brutus to your Julius Caesar,” Bannon said. “Yeah, Mitch, the donors aren’t happy, they’ve all left you.”
He told the crowd that Moore’s victory has spooked the establishment elites as it shows that money doesn’t matter, even going so far as to say that the more money they spend, “the fewer votes they get.”
.. Bannon warned Republicans who think they can hide from backing President Trump that their failure to support him will haunt them in the midterm primary seasons.
“No one can run and hide on this one, these folks are coming for you,” he warned. “The day of taking a few conservatives votes and hiding is over. These folks aren’t rubes, these folks aren’t idiots.”
.. Bannon also argued that the power of the Alabama vote can be shown in recent developments from the White House. He noted that since Moore’s Alabama victory, the Trump administration has issued an executive order on religious freedom, stopped the Obamacare insurance bailouts, pulled the U.S. out of UNESCO, decertified Iran’s compliance with the Iran nuclear deal, and pushed for a middle-class tax cut.
“Those are not random events folks, that is victory begets victory,” he said. “We owe that to Judge Roy Moore and the good men and women in Alabama because that all came from them.”
.. He urged Republican lawmakers who were on the fence on Trump to be more vocal in their support of his agenda as a way to avoid the populist storm brewing ahead of the 2018 midterms: “You can come to a stick and say ‘I am not going to vote for Mitch McConnell for Majority Leader’ and you can come to a stick and you can say ‘I’m going to do away with the filibuster so the president can implement his program.’”
“But until that time, they’re coming for you,” he warned.
The issue that is — unfortunately — uniting Americans on the left and the right
Some of the tenured class that sets the intellectual tone of the left concluded long ago that America was built by oppression, is sustained by white privilege and requires the cleansing purity of social revolution (however that is defined). In this story, capitalism accumulates inequities that will eventually lead the rich to eat the poor. The American Dream is an exploitative myth. Change will come only through a coalition of the aggrieved. And those who are not permanently enraged are not paying proper attention.
.. It is unrecognizable to people — mostly white people — who regard mid-20th-century America as a social and economic ideal. The country has been fundamentally altered by multiculturalism and political correctness. It has been ruined by secularism and moral relativism. America, says the Rev. Franklin Graham, is “on the verge of total moral and spiritual collapse.” And those who are not permanently offended are not paying proper attention... a poll taken last year found that 72 percent of Donald Trump supporters believe American society and its way of life have changed for the worse since the 1950s. And the most pessimistic and discontented lot of all was white evangelical Protestants. Almost three-quarters believed the past 70 years to be a period of social decline.Those of us who remember politics in the Reagan era have a mental habit of regarding conservatism as more optimistic about the American experiment and liberalism as more discontented... They are united in their belief that the United States is dominated by corrupt, self-serving elites. They are united in their call for radical rather than incremental change. While disagreeing deeply about the cause, they see America as careening off course... What group believes that American society has gotten better since the 1950s? About 60 percent of African Americans and Hispanics... Many conservatives have failed to appreciate the mixed legacy of modernity. In recent decades, the United States has seen declining community and family cohesion, and what former U.S. surgeon general Vivek H. Murthy calls “a loneliness epidemic.” “We live in the most technologically connected age in the history of civilization,” he says, “yet rates of loneliness have doubled since the 1980s.”.. elevate and praise American ideals while courageously applying them to our social inconsistencies and hypocrisies... And this might be matched with a spirit of gratitude — for a country capable of shame and change, and better than its grievances.
Why Christians will stick with Trump
The Supreme Court will soon consider the religious liberty of Jack Phillips in Masterpiece Cakeshop Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The state of Colorado has said that Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Phillips’s refusal to create custom wedding cakes celebrating same-sex wedding ceremonies violates the state’s law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation — despite Phillips’s policy of refusing to create other confections that collide with his faith, including cakes contain
ing alcohol or celebrating Halloween or atheism.
.. In the view of these voters, elites believe every knee must bend to their secular creed, not just on matters regarding sexual intimacy but also on issues of when life begins and when death ought to be optional... They hear themselves routinely — and unfairly — compared to racist bigots. They know that racial bigotry in the marketplace is illegal; indeed, they agree with the laws that make it so, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and believe those laws are righteous and, more to the point, constitutional... And they expect that, absent a new “test” emerging from the case now before the court, their civil right of free exercise of religion will be erased, quietly and quickly, from the constitutional canon.That fear drives a lot of politics these days, though it is only dimly perceived by political and media elites for whom the underlying variants of religious belief are at best unusual and sometimes unthinkable. I think that fear explains so much as to be almost too obvious an answer to too many current dilemmas.Why did Roy Moore win the GOP Senate primary in Alabama? People of faith may not agree with his positions — and most probably don’t — but they can count on him being on their side in free-exercise disputes. Why do evangelicals hang in with the president despite his all-too-frequent un-Christian bouts of public disdain toward others, attacks that are at odds with the gospel? Because his judicial appointments — the source of the ultimate protection of faith and the free-exercise clause — are not only solid, they are also better than those of either President Bush.
.. This remains a deeply religious country, and many of its most ardent believers distrust the federal courts and elite opinion-makers to such a degree that they will make common cause with those who will protect their freedom of conscience. The right to “free exercise” isn’t just one of many important rights to them; it is the central one by far. Figure that truth into your political analysis, and a lot more becomes clear.
Why Housing Is Unaffordable in California
in California’s coastal metros more than two-thirds of cities and counties have policies explicitly aimed at restricting housing growth, such as limits on density.
.. When a developer wants to break ground, local governments impose multilayered reviews that can mean getting approval from the municipal building department, health department, fire department and planning commission as well as elected officials.
Neighbors can delay or block projects using the state’s 1970 Environmental Quality Act. It isn’t coincidental that California’s housing prices soared during the 1970s. Getting a building permit in San Francisco takes about three times as long as in the typical American metro.
.. All told, it costs between $50,000 and $75,000 more to build a home in California than in the rest of the country. Building a low-income housing unit costs $332,000—about $80,000 more than the median home in Dallas or Phoenix.
.. Opponents accuse developers of being greedy, but their real gripe is that subdividing the lots would increase the housing stock and thereby diminish the value of their own homes.
.. California’s housing policies are intrinsically regressive. Limiting the supply drives up home values in well-to-do coastal communities, while pricing everyone else out of the market. Households in the lowest quartile in California spend about two-thirds of their incomes on housing; those in the top quartile spend just 16%.
.. The conundrum California’s landed gentry face is they want to boost their home values—and at the same time to have an abundant supply of low-wage workers to mow their lawns and clean their pools too.